Customer Reviews

Endpoint and Other Poems

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Once I heard a neighbor refer to our author as "little Johnny Updike" and when Rabbit ran, he drove down Rt 222S not too far from my door. To me and a friend or two it trumped Kerouac. A little more subtle, you might say. One book a year followed, just about, mainly the novels, where the protagonist never failed to tell me exactly how the world was going to feel in ten years when I reached the author's age. I am really, really going to miss that.

Several writers have commented on the greatness of these poems. That does them a disservice, I think. Updike doesn't show in the major anthologies and there's reason for that.

These poems show a cannily perceptive person facing his old age and then, suddenly, his impending death. The first half dozen are recent occasional pieces on his last birthdays

"the snowdrops lie/in drenched, bedraggled clumps/their tired news becoming weeds..."

Then a half dozen or so on the final illness

"My wife of thirty years is on the phone./I get a busy signal, and I know/she's in her grief and needs to organize/consulting friends. But me, I need her voice..."

There follow twenty or so assembled to fill out this book on varied subjects and occasions. They're marvelous Updike. Updike on TV, Updike on Helen of Troy, Updike on Monica Lewinski, Updike on Updike's career. How can there be no more Updike?

I searched out his Shillington home long ago. Only a few years ago I found the hardscrabble, woodsy farm in which he and the Mother lived. Tiny little farmhouse defaced with prefabs sprinkled about. Up the hill is the Lutheran church where the pastor shared his shocking thought that little Johnny would only be seeing Granny in heaven again in some very abstract and meaningless way. Updike said he felt like reporting this heresy to every adult he knew.

The poems in every section feature Reading and environs, his family, his schoolmates, the Sweet Shop... small city life in Pennsylvania Dutch country.

"...I had to move/ to beautiful New England - its triple deckers, whited chuches, unplowed streets-/to learn how drear and deadly life can be."

Did I say I'm going to miss this guy?

This volume contains the last writings of John Updike. He wrote some of these poems when he was aware of the fact that he was dying of cancer. Updike is of course known as one of America's greatest second- half of the twentieth - century novelists. He is too known as its perhaps most accomplished man- of- letters. Through the years he too produced a considerable number of volumes of Poetry. They were skilled and polished works, works of a master craftsman as this work is also.
The volume also contains a sequence of Poems which he wrote at various birthday- celebrations. And too has a number of miscellaneous poems.
The most moving poems here are those in which he takes a look at his life as a whole, his childhood friendships, the tremendous transformations that Time has brought. The situation itself is a poignant one. We seek the wisdom of the great man before his going. We seek to understand how he struggles with the pains of his illness, and the fear before Death.
Updike was by all accounts an extremely cordial and likeable person. His great intelligence was coupled with a certain modesty. And this despite the dazzling character of his literary skill, his acrobatic stylistic brilliance.
My own sense is that his skill as a writer , or rather his many skills were more manifest in the longer spaces and elaborations of prose- and that the art of condensation which is poetry's essence was not really what his spirit was in tune with.
Nonetheless there is much to be moved by in this volume. And to be surprised by. Updike so celebrated and loved as a writer imagines in one poem he will be readily forgotten. In another he shows a religious sensibility a spirit of prayer. He is as always alert to the paradoxical beauties of the everyday.
Perhaps one could wish this last gift of his to us to be somewhat larger,more inclusive, more filled with comments on family and his close relationships.
But one, I think, should take this as yet another gift from a writer who has given readers so so much.

This book is a special gift John Updike gave his readers just before he died in January 2009. It comprises the poems he wrote during the last six or seven years of his life, among them his very last poems, some of them written on his deathbed,in the Mass. General Hospital, Boston, deeply moving poems, sad and serene. There are lots of other poems, even funny poems,about all aspects of life, about childhood and family, about sex and sports and nature and travelling. "Endpoint" is - as most the novels Updike wrote during his long and prolific lifetime - a unique celebration of life.

His fiction praised,awards and honors won,
John always seemed too Ivy League for me.
Rabbit was much too horny for my taste.
Although I read Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu
A dozen times,his skinny book of poems
Was just a whim, purchased to pass my time.
I think he may have saved his best for last
And see his genius now for what it was.

I too search for that boy lost in my mirror
And think of friends and family long since gone,
My birthdays savored like these classic poems.
John lingered with us long enough to leave
A final gift for those who stayed to watch
The credits roll before the curtain fell.

If you like poetry, poetry that will move you and stay with you after the book is closed and put on a shelf, you will like this book. The most amazing aspect of this for me is that, even though Updike was at the very end of his life (he died in 1/09), he was creating wonderful new poetry with practically his last breath. It is inspiring on many, many levels. Read this book yourself, and find out how it strikes you.

John Updike, Endpoint (Knopf, 2009)

The first John Updike book I read was <em>Midpoint</em>, his 1969 collection of poetry, published when he was thirty-seven. I was going to try and make some sort of inane comparison with <em>Endpoint</em>, Updike's final book, published posthumously, but I figure that fact that <em>Midpoint</em> actually ended up almost being an exact midpoint makes any point I was going to make there far more elegantly than I would have. And while Updike's poetry has gotten a great deal more conservative over the years (I know a magazine editor or two who use the sonnets in <em>Midpoint</em> as examples of how avant-garde formal poetry can be they'll accept for publication), Updike to the end never lost an ounce of his sense of the wonders inherent in the English language, and how to shape those wonders into something ineffable (Campbell McGrath, at a posthumous reading of the book, said Updike's use of language is comparable to sound effects in a film; indeed):

"Today, the author hits three score thirteen,
an age his father, woken in the night
by pressure on his heart, fell short of. Still,
I scribble on. My right hand occupies
the center of my vision, faithful old
five-fingered beast of burden, dappled with
some psoriatic spots I used to hate..."
(--"The Author Observes His Birthday, 2005")

You can take it as a whole and probably miss some stuff, but if you want to isolate something, just read through that slowly, emphasizing the s sounds, and then pause and consider the landscape Updike has created in that short section. It's hilly, gently so, and windswept, and has a few tufts of dead grass here and there but is otherwise barren--and endlessly fascinating. I ended up liking this just as much as I did <em>Midpoint</em>, which was quite a pleasant surprise given the relentlessly autobiographical nature of much of the material here. Highly recommended. ****

I marvelled over each page...even when he was dying...he wrote beautiful poetry about the act of dying. This man is excellent...it goes without saying. The book arrived perfectly and without damage.

John Updike's "Endpoint and Other Poems" was published posthumously last year, after a long and stellar writing career. Some of these poems were written in the last year of his life, some even in the last month.

The volume is divided into four sections: Endpoint, which are a series of birthday poems he wrote for himself between 2002 and 2008, along with poems written in the hospital as he was dying; Other Poems, an eclectic group whose subjects range from stolen paintings and singer Frankie Lane to doo wop and an elegy for golfer Payne Stewart; Sonnets, which cover music, places and people both real and imagined; and Light and Personal, which include poems on country music and his wife on her birthday.

A selection from the birthday poem for 2008, "Spirit of '76," written in Tucson, Arizona, gives a sense of the Endpoint poems:

Here in this place of arid clarity,
two thousand miles from my souvenirs
collect a cozy dust, the piled produce
of bald ambition pulling ignorama,
I see clear through to the ultimate page,
the silence I dared break for my small time.
No piece was easy, but each fell finished,
in its shroud of print, into a book-shaped hole.

And from "Baseball:"

...football can be learned,
and basketball finessed, but
there is no hiding from baseball
the fact that some are chosen
and some are not...

There is something of self-indulgence about many of these poems. But in the last years of Updike's life, with the body of fiction, essays, articles, poetry and even movie reviews he left behind, self-indulgence can be forgiven.

"Endpoint and Other Poems" is the work of old age, when confidence and reputation is not something to be achieved and accomplished but simply enjoyed. And I think John Updike enjoyed writing these poems.

So easy to relate to and thought provoking. His ease at expressing himself is so apparent. Love it! I will get it as a gift to my step daughter who recently lost her Mom.

The condition of the book, the cover wrapper and photo were all excellent. The best part, however, was the sharing from an observer of life during the last days of his own life...some sad, some joyful, all thought provoking.